swill453 wrote:Well the February results are out, and we won our usual smattering of £25 prizes.

As I write, they're available at the online prize checker, but not through the app. I'm sure that'll sort itself out soon.

Actually there seems to be something a bit strange going on.

For me, the online prize checker says I've won 2 x £25, but the prize history in my online account only shows 1 x £25 for February.

That's fairly normal - I've often had it where the prize history seems to need a catch-up over the next few days.

The account-total is usually the figure I use on the relevant morning of the new month to see what I've won, and that's been correct every time.

I'd give it a few days and see if things line back up at some point - I'd be interested to hear your experience with this, as I often see the same thing as you're seeing now - in fact having just checked, my history is only showing one £25 prize this month, whereas my balance is showing that I've had 3 x £25 prizes....

swill453 wrote:Actually there seems to be something a bit strange going on.

For me, the online prize checker says I've won 2 x £25, but the prize history in my online account only shows 1 x £25 for February.

Meanwhile the app is saying "sorry there is a problem, try later".

I see 3 x £25 on the prize checker for February. Logging on shows Previous draw £25 won and clicking on View Account > Prize History shows that £25 is for January (the previous draw!). Are you sure yours showed February for your £25?

PinkDalek wrote:I see 3 x £25 on the prize checker for February. Logging on shows Previous draw £25 won and clicking on View Account > Prize History shows that £25 is for January (the previous draw!). Are you sure yours showed February for your £25?

Yes. It shows £25 for January (which is correct) and £25 for February (which doesn't match the 2 x £25 reported by the prize checker.

I tweeted @nsandihelp and they replied "We are aware of this issue, Scott. As soon as this has been resolved, they'll match with the correct result. If the problem persists after this, get in touch and we'll be able to look into this for you. Tom".

swill453 wrote:I tweeted @nsandihelp and they replied "We are aware of this issue, Scott. As soon as this has been resolved, they'll match with the correct result. If the problem persists after this, get in touch and we'll be able to look into this for you. Tom".

They've now added a further reply to you!:

Scott—just realised you’re talking about your online prize history. This will be updated on Monday. If the prize draw results are released on a Saturday, we update your online account after the weekend. Sorry for the confusion!

Strange that we are seeing different things though on our respective online accounts.

I read in today's Times that 10 children under 16 have won the £1m PB prize in the past decade. Imagine what trouble that would cause in a family if their siblings had won little or nothing with their bonds. Apparently they can get their hands on the cash once they are l6. I wonder if bonds can be held in the joint names of all siblings.

When I was a baby, my parents took the money they received as birthday gifts for me from family members and bought premium bonds. By the late 1960s this equated to £15 in Premium Bonds. This was equivalent to around £200 in today’s money taking into account inflation.

The bonds remained in an envelope at the back of a drawer for almost 25 years.

When I got married, my parents handed them over to me. Up to this point I was unaware of their existence. My parents encouraged me at the time to see how much value they had accumulated as it would help myself and my wife to setup our new home. I promised I would. I put the envelope at the back of a drawer with the firm intent of checking on any prizes accumulated.

Our first child was born and then our second. On each occasion my parents asked if I’d checked on the prizes or if I wanted them to buy some Premium Bonds for our son and then our daughter. Both times I said I’d dig out the envelope from the back of the drawer. I didn’t. It remained there, unchecked.

Our son turned 16. Our daughter turned 16. My parents reminded me again about the Premium Bonds. This was now the age of the internet and prize details were online. I dug out the envelope and checked for winnings online but the bonds were so old that I was directed to write to National Savings as old Premium Bond records hadn’t been brought online as yet. I wrote a letter and received a response. The Bonds were in my mother’s name, not my name. Unsurprisingly they had moved house over the intervening period. My mother would need to supply some additional information to update her registration.

I took the correspondence and the Premium Bonds, put them back in the envelope and put the envelope back in the drawer.

Time moved on. Our son and daughter graduated from university. Our son got married. Our daughter moved to the US to work for a year. We decluttered and then moved house. The envelope came across with us in the move and found its way into a different drawer in the office in our new home. Our daughter came back to the UK, tracked us down and boomeranged back home again. Our son and his wife had a child, our first granddaughter!

For reasons I still can’t fathom, my wife went to a spiritualist. During the ‘reading’ the spiritualist had a ‘vision’ about my mother being entitled to some unclaimed money. Later in the week she recounted details of the ‘reading’ to my parents and they were intrigued. We thought long and hard and kicked around a few theories. One was a possible unclaimed pension from my mother’s early jobs with an organisation who are still trading. She made a few phone calls but they confirmed there was no unclaimed pension.

Then the subject of the Premium Bonds came up again. Did I still have them? Yes, of course... they’re in the envelope with the correspondence from around 10 years ago when we last looked into this and did nothing more about it. I want to the drawer in the office and took them out.

This morning, around 10am, we logged back into the NS&I website. In the intervening years the old Premium Bonds had been brought online and allocated to an account in my mother’s name and with her updated address. We went through the registration process including successfully answering a number of credit reference security questions to confirm her identity. No identity documents needed. No fuss. Registration completed in about 10 minutes.

The Premium Bonds were bought when I was a baby, not yet walking. £15. Equivalent to around £200 today. I’m now 52 years young. We logged in to see the account balance, original bonds plus all accumulated prizes over the past 50 years.

The account balance was.............................

£15

Not one prize in 50 years.

The story of my life. Shaggy Dog story? No. Completely true.

Exchange your time for money. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest in real assets such as passive index trackers. Build wealth. Aim for your FIRE number. Jack in work. Enjoy your leisure time. Live long and prosper.

I wish everyone the best with their Premium Bonds but I won’t be buying any for our grandchildren. I hit the ‘cash in’ button on the website and entered my mother’s bank account details. She should be receiving the £15 back in her account during the course of next week and promised to pass it on as it’s my birthday money from 50 years ago.

I’m thinking about framing the old £10 and £5 Premium Bond Vouchers and hanging them in the office to act as a constant reminder of the time value of money and the impact of inflation.

For an awful moment, I thought you were going to tell us that your brother/sister had won £1m, though they probably wouldn't have told you if they had.

Agree they are not much good as an investment but a safe place to park money you are going to need to access quickly at some point in the future without the risk of any drop in value. Also useful to pay towards IHT before probate is granted.

Degsy67 wrote:I’m thinking about framing the old £10 and £5 Premium Bond Vouchers and hanging them in the office to act as a constant reminder of the time value of money and the impact of inflation.

Of course, I understand and can appreciate why you take that view.

However, what if your mother had put the actual £15 in a drawer?

That would have been the *worst* situation for that sum of money in terms of outcomes, as at least you've had the chance to win something in the meantime with the Premium Bonds, even if that didn't actually happen in this particular case....

I mention this only because my own foray into Premium Bonds has been with a lump of capital that, to me anyway, was fairly substantial, and was sitting in one of my investment accounts acting as my 'market war-chest' fund, to be used if and when the market takes one of it's fairly regular bouts of doom and gloom.

So in effect, my lump of money *was* 'sat in a drawer', feeling the effects of inflation month after month, and I have now moved that sum of money over to my Premium Bonds account, where those effects are now mitigated *somewhat*, at the very least....

It won't set the world alight, I don't imagine, but it's absolutely got a chance to do so, and I do enjoy logging in to my PB account each month and seeing what seems to be really quite regular small prizes, and whilst they've currently been of amounts that won't change my life, I do know that they are a damn sight more than my capital would have earned in my broker account, and I see the capital as being in safer hands now than they were then, broker ring-fence or no ring-fence....

So whilst you've got a valid point, and have had really bad luck over the years, I wouldn't like you to perhaps put others off that might be in the position that I found myself in, where Premium Bonds actually might well be a perfectly valid *improvement* in capital allocation....

I'll merely repeat my earlier post, I won £100 in 1958, on a then holding of £68. Followed up with £25 in 1977 and £50 in 2005, on the same holding. I haven't worked out what the £68 would be worth now, if invested elsewhere, nor what I should have done with the £175 of prizes. The latter two prizes were probably consumed in a number of pubs, somewhere or other.

Degsy67 wrote:The Premium Bonds were bought when I was a baby, not yet walking. £15. Equivalent to around £200 today. I’m now 52 years young. We logged in to see the account balance, original bonds plus all accumulated prizes over the past 50 years.

The account balance was.......

£15

Not one prize in 50 years.

The story of my life. Shaggy Dog story? No. Completely true.

But... £15 in Premium Bonds? Would you expect to have won, even over 50 years? I haven't done the maths - not easy with varying chances over half a century - but with just 15 bonds I wouldn't have expected anything.

Degsy67 wrote:I’m thinking about framing the old £10 and £5 Premium Bond Vouchers and hanging them in the office to act as a constant reminder of the time value of money and the impact of inflation.

Not a bad idea. OTOH, if you actually want to have a realistic chance of any yearly income from PBs today you will need more than a couple of orders of magnitude greater number of bonds.

I reckon absolute minimum £5k- less than that and the return is very 'noisy' - you either do spectacularly well or get nowt.My £12.5k seem to return 1% to 2% typically - better than short bonds (ERNS etc) and the remote chance of winning big...